Time (and time again)

It’s a wonderful thing to have time, but no one really does. If you think about how short life is, how few times you will do the things you love, or see the ones who matter most to you, it seems like those things are always around until they’re not.

Time has changed for me this year. For one thing, like most of the world, I had a bout with COVID, and had to quarantine for a few days. It was interesting to be forced to slow down. I mean, I’ve gone to work much sicker than I was this time around, but on top of it being required, I didn’t want to get people around me sick. Who knows who isn’t vaccinated, and who is going to discover some secondary condition they didn’t know they had, so even if I wasn’t feeling that ill, it was still a good thing to stay home. It was nice to look out off my balcony, and see the mountains, and be peaceful. (And, well, work from home. I prepared a lot of online things for my students.)

The end of this year will finish with me taking a sabbatical, and when I come back from this, I’ll work less. I’m going to do a yoga teacher training this summer, and I’m looking into offering a yoga class once a week down in the valley. I’ll see what sort of structure I can find, but I’d like to start doing that part time, along with my work as a teacher.

So time is a thing, and I don’t feel like I have that much of it. I’m 53, soon to be 54, and it’s all going so fast. In the news recently, there’s been a ton of noteworthy people dying between seventy and eighty, from COVID sometimes, but also cancers, heart attacks and whatnot. It’s not that far away. I hope I’m using my life well, and that I won’t have regrets. There are so many things I want to do! There’s just the time thing….